"What's Your Crescent Wrench?"

“Hand me the crescent wrench.” “The what?” I was spending the first of many summers on my uncle’s dairy farm. I was only eleven years old and although I had lived in the country I had never lived on a farm. It was quite an adventure as I was introduced to a very different world from the one I had been living in. Specifically, at home we only had a few tools, including pliers, a hammer, and a flat head screw driver. So when my uncle asked for a crescent wrench while we were working on a tractor in the machine shop, I was clueless as to what this could be.

My cousin, who was also in the machine shop, having been raised on the farm and having worked with my uncle all of his life, started to tease me. “You don’t even know what a crescent wrench is? How dumb can you be?” My uncle quickly came to my defense at the expense of my cousin. “How can you expect him to know what something is if he has never seen it before?” At that point my uncle picked up the wrench he needed to use and showed it to me. Although he did not articulate it in this way, he knew that if I had no exposure to something, if it was not part of my frame of reference, I would be unable to identify it. To this day I know what a crescent wrench is and have used one on many occasions. It has gained notoriety in my life as the infamous “knuckle buster.”

All of us have “crescent wrenches” in our lives. They are those things for which we have no frame of reference, of which we are ignorant. Ignorance is understandable and even somewhat acceptable until a person is given or takes the opportunity to know better. With that opportunity we should grow in our understanding.

Additionally, we should be patient toward those who have not been exposed to the same information that we have. The eunuch said to Phillip when asked if he understood the passage from Isaiah that he was reading, “How can I unless someone explains it to me?” (Acts 8:31) Paul says that faith comes from hearing the Word. Without hearing there can be no understanding. (See Romans 10:17)